How Startups Should Do SEO
It’s not always easy for new businesses to begin SEO effectively, but keep reading to find out how startups should do SEO to build a solid online presence.
As a startup, it is easier to lose focus on optimizing long term strategies like SEO because you are often too fixated on short term goals.
But it is important to remember that without a good online presence, your product/service (no matter how great it is) will not help you achieve your goals.
Without a solid SEO plan in place, you will be lost in the digital purgatory.
Here are consolidated tips on how startups should do SEO to prevent this from happening:
Enrich your title tags with relevant keywords
Title tags are important. Many websites make the mistake of keeping the same title tag throughout their website. However, this practice is bad.
When writing your title tags, make sure that you include relevant keywords and also keep unique tags for each page of your website.
For instance, when your title tag says “company name – specific service”, it helps your audience know more about the landing page than just using the company name.
You’ll notice in this example that the company uses keywords in the title to deliver a clear message to potential customers without simply listing keywords separated by commas or dashes. This is important to note, because search engines are savvy enough to distinguish between keyword spammy titles and titles that will provide a higher click through rate for browsers.
Set up your Webmaster tools account
A Google Webmaster tools account is useful for a plethora of reasons.
From setting your target country under international targeting to analyzing crawl errors (everything that prevented Google from correctly crawling your website), this tool offers multiple benefits.
From the dashboard section of the Webmaster tools account, you can also check the keywords that Google has found on your website. This information helps you understand whether you are optimizing your keyword as per the search queries of your audience or not.
Identify Your Major SEO Opportunities
SEO is diverse, and when you think of doing your SEO right, it is important to keep in mind that your SEO opportunities largely depend on your goals and your industry.
When you are just starting out, it is important to identify your SEO opportunities so you can use them. There are many aspects to SEO, from technical optimization to building better content strategies, each of these play a crucial role.
Depending on the sphere you operate in, the various SEO aspects take different precedence. Like for the healthcare industry, creating invaluable content is a much more effective SEO strategy than creating backlinks.
1. Improve your “appearance” in the search results
How you show up in the search results plays an important role in your success. It’s not just potential investors who research businesses online to make informed decisions – it’s your potential customers.
Today, your “search appearance” is a lot more than just a simple website listing. If you implement SEO as part of your online marketing strategy then you will most certainly be utilizing local business listings and business citations such as Google My Business and this ties in customer review and ratings which are very prominent in the search results. To improve your search appearance it is essential to maintain your business reputation – just take a look at some of these stats:
• 97% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses in 2017, with 12% looking for a local business.
• 85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations
• Consumers read an average of 7 reviews before trusting a business – up from 6 last year
Why should this matter to you? Because when a potential customer looks up your business and finds a negative review displayed prominently next to your headline on the very first page of search results, it doesn’t really instill a lot of confidence.
2. Build your authority
One of the fundamental components that governs the SEO success is authority. And this component relies largely on quality rather than quantity.
If you are churning out content on a daily basis but none of it has a unique viewpoint, you will not be able to survive the online competition.
Make sure that each page of your website has at least 300 words of unique content that cannot be found anywhere else on the internet.
3. Go social!
Your social presence influences your search rankings.
Many startups fail in their SEO strategies simply because they overlook the importance of creating a strong social network.
Find social profiles of strong influencers in your niche and interact with them. Once you have established a strong social relationship, you can send your pitch.
Find out How To Use Social Influence to Motivate Consumer Buying Decisions – here!
4. Call them to take action through engaging meta descriptions
Meta description is the text that is displayed below your URL on search results page. This information is a short snippet of what your website offers.
These 160 character descriptions play a key role in your click through rates. Optimising your meta description text can give you the necessary edge over your competitors as this text is what makes users click.
Writing actionable and engaging metas can bring in more visitors. These descriptions should be descriptive and if possible, they should include some attention grabbing detail like what you offer that other companies don’t.
5. Do not forget to include visual elements in your strategy
When you are creating your SEO strategy, it is important to remember that you shouldn’t just rely on text but also include videos, infographics etc in your content strategy.
In fact, videos help you rank higher on SERP. As a startup, this can be a blessing for your website.
Having a well defined visual strategy can also help you create a good social presence in less amount of time. Because social is all about engagement and visual content plays a key role in it.
Create SEO strategies with a “long term mindset”
Your SEO strategy could be centered around content marketing or building high quality backlinks, but you must always focus on doing something that lasts.
In order to be able to rank high for targeted keywords, you must deploy a long term SEO strategy. The roadmap to SEO success is not defined because each and every industry has different SEO roots.
Having a long-term mindset with clearly defined objectives and milestones can help you stay up to date with the SEO trends and utilise them effectively.
Conclusion
While SEO is built upon a few specific pillars, those pillars can have different foundations depending on the requirement of the audience. For any startup, it is important to build on strategies that pay off in the long run instead of just focusing on quick fixes.
From optimizing your website for a great user experience to building a good reputation in the search results, everything matters. Because your appeal should be backed up by strong links and a good online presence.
Grab the right SEO opportunities, track their results at every step to stay ahead in the competition.
